"Graduate Housing Tips" by Steve Breen



"Graduate Housing Tips" - Steve Breen, San Diego Union Tribune, San Diego, California, US

Sisters In Law

A good piece on Saudi women learning about their rights, & laws related to women, in the kingdom. The article brings forth quite a few issues & I'll analyse 2 of them here:

1. Saudi women, with whom the author spoke, kept saying that there's nothing wrong with the Saudi legal system or Saudi legal system in regards to women's rights is among the best in the world. Saudi legal system is primarily based on Sharia, Islamic legal jurisprudence, which has its bases in Quran, Prophet Mohammad's (Peace Be Upon Him) Sunnah, & the 4 main schools of thoughts in Islam (Saudis follow the Hanbali school of thought). So, the question arises, how can anything be wrong with a legal system, which has been made by the Creator, itself?

Now, yes, the monarchy does have its hand in the molding of the law in the way it likes, but it can only do so to a certain extent, & cannot do too much changes in the legal system, regardless of how much it wants to make laws in its own favour.

Islam gave women their legal & social rights back in 600 AD. They are perfect in every sense. But, today's Muslim women see the West & want to emulate their form of feminism in their homes, in their relationships, in their social circles & in their society. First of all, Western form of feminism & women's rights are not feminism at all. Making a woman dance naked in the middle of street is not akin to giving her freedom to do anything. Absence of clothes does not make a woman more powerful in the eyes of the society. Muslim women who are trying to follow the Western form of feminism are essentially going against the orders of their Creator, God (Allah), who they claim to love a lot (if you love your Creator so much, then you may not want to disobey its orders). That's why, the Islamic countries are being destroyed socially, culturally, & religiously, because women are making the Western feminism as their ideal form of liberation.

2. Now, part of the reason Muslim women are emulating Western feminism is their cycle of thought that Muslim men are so abusive & have so much power, because Islam gives them so much power, & hence, there's something wrong with Islam that it is not moving forward with the changing society & has stayed backward in the 600 AD.

As we can see from the article that even Saudi women have no knowledge of their rights in Islam & Saudi Arabian legal system. Quran is primarily written in Arabic language. The same language Saudi women speak in their society. So, a religious book, which is written in their own language, should be easily understandable to women, when they are reading it. But, it's apparent, that they never bothered to dig deeper in Quran & its legal jurisprudence to learn about women's rights in Islam, in depth.

That's a huge problem with Muslims, nowadays. Be it men or women, Muslims are not reading & understanding their own religious book, Quran, & Sunnah, to understand it in depth & learning what their rights & obligations towards Allah, towards each other in different kinds of relationships, & towards their society are. After all, even in secular / non-religious areas, ignorance of a country's laws can never be used as a defense in committing a crime. It is obligatory for each & every Muslim to learn what the Quran, Sunnah, & jurisprudence says about issues in their lives. As we learn from the article that once these Saudi women came to learn what are their rights in Islam & Saudi Arabia, they are talking about the laws are good, but their application is not, which is due to sheer ignorance.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/sisters-in-law

In September, 2014, Mohra Ferak, 22 years old and in her final year at Dar Al-Hekma University, in the Saudi port city of Jeddah, was asked for advice by a woman who had heard that she was studying law. The woman was the principal of a primary school for girls, and she told Ferak that she had grown frustrated by her inability to help children in her charge who had been raped; over the years, there had been many such cases among her students. Regardless of whether the perpetrator was a relative or the family driver, the victim’s parents invariably declined to press charges. A Saudi family’s honor rests, to a considerable degree, on its ability to protect the virginity of its daughters. Parents, fearing ruined marriage prospects, chose silence, which meant that men who had raped girls as young as 8 went unpunished, and might act again. And for some of the girls, the principal added, the secrecy only amplified the trauma. She asked Ferak if there was anything that she, as principal, could do to help them.

“I told her, ‘You can go to court and ask the judge to make the proceedings private and save the girl’s reputation,’ ” Ferak recalled one recent afternoon. ... The principal was amazed to learn that Saudi plaintiffs can request closed court proceedings. She began peppering Ferak with legal questions, many of them about how to advise teachers who were in abusive marriages, or whose ex-husbands wouldn’t allow their children to visit. The principal was in her early fifties, which meant that, as a school administrator, she was among the best-educated Saudi women of her generation. Well into the 1980s, according to UNESCO, fewer than half of Saudi girls between the ages of 6 and 11 had received any education outside the home. But, Ferak said, it quickly became clear that the woman knew little about the fundamental principles of Saudi law.

Ferak had been a middling student during her first 3 years at Dar Al-Hekma, an all-female university. A week after talking with the principal, she went to Olga Nartova, who chairs the law department, and described the conversation. Nartova, a 36 year old trade-law specialist from Moscow, had previously found Ferak to be bright but unmotivated, like many girls from well-off families. But Ferak spoke about women’s rights with a seriousness of purpose that Nartova had never seen in any student at Dar Al-Hekma.
...

With Nartova’s encouragement, Ferak began planning a series of free public lectures at the university, aimed at women and delivered by distinguished legal scholars and lawyers. The presentations were designed to provide basic information about Saudi women’s legal rights. “Since I was very young, and started noticing how women are treated in this country, I’ve had this feeling about women,” Ferak said. “I don’t like anyone to underestimate us.” But women’s rights aren’t a subject of mainstream public discussion in the kingdom, and she wondered whether anyone besides the principal would attend. She also worried about how the experts would react to being approached by a student.

Ferak compiled a list of topics that she felt were of particular importance to local women, and she began contacting lawyers. The first lecture in the series, which Ferak called Hawa’a’s Rights (Hawa’a is the Arabic version of the name Eve), was publicized on Twitter and took place on the evening of April 15th. Several dozen attendees learned about crimes perpetrated against women on social media, a topic of special concern in a country where single people of opposite sexes cannot spend time together without risking arrest, and where pressure on women to cover their faces in public can be so intense that the most innocent head shot can serve as a tool of blackmail.

The second Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, on April 26th, addressed personal-status law, the category of Saudi law that governs marriage, divorce, guardianship, and inheritance. The lecturer, Bayan Mahmoud Zahran—a 30 year old Jeddah attorney who, in January, 2014, became the first Saudi woman to open a law firm—was scheduled to begin speaking at five o’clock, launching an evening of discussion that would run until nine. Late that afternoon, Ferak arrived at the university to find a long black line of abaya-clad women waiting to be seated.

Institutions and businesses that serve Saudi women are carefully guarded, so as to prevent ikhtilat, illegal gender mixing, and the only male employees of a Saudi girls’ school or women’s college are its security officers, who are stationed at the checkpoint outside, inspecting identification cards and keeping watch for male intruders. The security guards were overwhelmed by the turnout for the second Hawa’a’s Rights event. Ferak corralled several friends, and they spent the half hour beforehand rushing from classroom to classroom, looking for extra chairs to carry down to the space that had been reserved. They filled the aisles and the back of the room with additional seats, straining the hall’s intended capacity of 120.

“There were students, mothers, teachers, lots of workers in shops—really, every kind of woman, even doctors from the university,” Ferak told me. “All of us were just looking at each other, thinking, Is this even possible?” When Nartova came out of her office, a few minutes before Zahran’s talk, she saw women struggling to find standing room in the back and on the stairs, while others sat on the floor by the dais. Ferak texted a photo of the packed hall to her father, who had shared her initial doubts about interest in the lectures. He teasingly texted back, “Are you trying to make women fight with their husbands?” The third Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, a practical introduction to Saudi labor law for women just entering the workforce, attracted a still larger crowd. The university did not schedule a fourth event.

In 2004, Saudi Arabia introduced reforms allowing women’s colleges and universities to offer degree programs in law. The first female law students graduated in 2008, but, for several years after that, they were prohibited from appearing in court. In 2013, law licenses were granted to 4 women, including Bayan Mahmoud Zahran. Journalists and legal scholars in the West wondered if a fresh contingent of female attorneys would champion women’s rights. But, of the dozens of female lawyers and law graduates I spoke with on a visit to Saudi Arabia in early November, only two would admit to any interest in expanding rights for Saudi women. So far, the greatest effect of the reforms seems to be a growing awareness, among ordinary Saudi women, of the legal rights they do have, and an increasing willingness to claim these rights, even by seeking legal redress, if necessary.

The lawyers conceded that, by international standards, these rights might not look like much. According to Saudi law, which is based on Sharia, a Saudi woman’s testimony in court is, with few exceptions, valued at half that of a man. A homicide case, for example, normally requires testimony from two male witnesses; if only one is available, two female witnesses may be substituted for the other. The guardianship system—which requires an adult woman to get permission from her guardian before travelling overseas or seeking medical care—gives Saudi women a legal status that resembles that of a minor. In fact, the male relative with responsibility over a Saudi woman may be her own adolescent son.

A Saudi woman cannot leave her home without covering her hair and putting on a floor-length abaya. She cannot drive a car. Since 2013, women have been allowed to ride bicycles, but only in designated parks and recreation areas, chaperoned by a close male relative. The marriages of Saudi women are usually arranged, and it remains extremely difficult for women to obtain divorces. Husbands, in contrast, may marry up to three other women “on top of them,” as the Arabic expression goes, and in some cases may end a marriage in the time it takes to repeat “I divorce you” three times—or to type the so-called triple divorce formula into a text message.

In December, 2007, I arrived in Saudi Arabia for the first time. Although I had read thousands of pages about Saudi laws and cultural conventions, it was a shock to confront the system as a lived reality. Abundant resources go into maintaining the women-only bank branches, government offices, shops, and other businesses that make up the infrastructure of gender segregation in the kingdom. ...
...

Today, several thousand Saudi women hold law degrees, and 67 are licensed to practice, according to justice-ministry figures released at the end of November. ... Two of the Jeddah firms where Ferak has applied for jobs in recent months indicated interest, but then told her that they lacked the license from the kingdom’s labor ministry which authorizes a business to let women work in its office. The labor ministry requires firms that employ women to build separate areas for female workers, allowing them to communicate with male colleagues without the risk of being seen by them. In supermarkets, which have employed women since 2013, low partitions suffice, because semi-public spaces are easily monitored by members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom’s religious police. But businesses that operate from enclosed workplaces, such as offices, face tougher regulations. One result of these restrictions, Ferak explained, is that, at present, only the largest Saudi law firms employ women.

Despite her frustrations, Ferak pointed out that women’s efforts to gain more respect and influence in Saudi public life have been progressing rather quickly, considering the country’s relative youth, and especially considering the Arabian Peninsula’s tribal, deeply traditional culture. Ferak appeared to be echoing the “baby steps” theory of social progress, often put forth by Saudi leaders as a way of excusing rights abuses or the rhetorical excesses of government-backed clerics. It wasn’t clear how sincerely she believed it. ...
...

Nevertheless, Ferak, like every other female law graduate I spoke with, wanted me to understand that individual Saudis and local traditions, not Saudi laws, were the source of her struggles. Saudi laws, she insisted, were “perfect” (a word that I heard at least half a dozen times, from other women her age, in reference to the Saudi legal system). Saudi women’s woes were merely the result of the laws’ misapplication. The fact that I’d sought her out seemed to surprise her, and to raise concerns that foreigners might misunderstand. Although Saudi men sometimes mistreated women, the solution lay not in changing the system but in educating women about their rights within the existing structure.

Perhaps surprisingly in a country notable for its strict rules, relatively little of Saudi law is written down. The legal system has been augmented, during the 83 years since the kingdom was founded, by royal decrees, many of which overlap, or even contradict one another. This body of law is interpreted by senior clerics, who serve as judges, largely following the Hanbali School, the strictest of the four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence. The notion of judicial precedent does not play a role in Saudi law, so judges enjoy considerable freedom of interpretation.

Yet the system’s ambiguities also preserve the need for a monarch with final authority, and this means that the personality, moods, and tastes of the head of state are felt in the lives of his subjects in ways that would be unimaginable to citizens of a modern democracy. Absolute power, Saudis say, has a way of trickling down, of turning ordinary policemen and public officials into petty tyrants. Justice is often situational; the law is what a person in a position of power decides it is. If devout Muslims openly question Islamic teaching, they are vulnerable to accusations of heresy, which is a capital crime in Saudi Arabia. And the risks of questioning have grown in recent months. The current Saudi king, Salman, came to power following the death of King Abdullah. Since then, accusations of heresy and of apostasy—also a capital crime in Saudi Arabia—have increasingly been levelled against government critics. ...
...

... Across the kingdom, the atmosphere is newly cautious, and a young law graduate who wishes to speak of her growing awareness of injustice in Saudi institutions knows that she must express herself with enormous care.

Several days after my conversation with Ferak at the Lebanese restaurant, I set out to meet Bayan Mahmoud Zahran, whose law firm has made her the most famous female Saudi lawyer in the world. ...
...

Zahran’s firm is expanding, with a half-dozen employees and a fledgling corporate department ... . But women with personal-status cases make up the majority of her client base. The judicial system puts women at a disadvantage, she said. “Women generally are more emotional, and they can’t get their rights because they’re so emotional, and they just cry,” she told me. She seemed to suggest that the main obstacle was not the legal system but a tendency of women clients to become overwrought. Female lawyers can help, she said, because they can “understand the emotion and translate it into something valid for the court.”

Some of the lawyers I met said that women increasingly insist on being represented when inheritances are divided. In early October, at the end of the Islamic calendar year, the Saudi justice ministry announced that in the past twelve months there had been a 48% increase in cases of khula, divorces initiated by women. A Saudi newspaper reported that such divorces now make up a “staggering” 4.2% of the total. ...

Yet in this privacy-obsessed society, with its weak traditions of individual rights, many Saudi women still struggle to obtain legal information. As far as any of the lawyers I interviewed were aware, the Hawa’a’s Rights initiative has been the only organized attempt to educate Saudi women about the law. Eight months after the series ended, Ferak continues to receive messages suggesting new topics and asking when to expect another event. Sometimes, Ferak said, her correspondents plead with her not to give up, telling her that the lectures changed their outlook—even the arc of their lives. During her last year at Dar Al-Hekma, Ferak found a new purpose in her studies, and her grades rose sharply. She told Olga Nartova, “I realized why I was studying law.” She hopes to continue the Hawa’a’s Rights lectures, but has not found a venue. Intrigued by the Western understanding of human rights, she has begun to explore graduate programs abroad, where she might study the subject.

On the afternoon of the first Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, Salwa al-Khawari, a teacher at a girls’ school, was heading home when her friend Nour mentioned the event. On learning that the subject of discussion would be women’s rights within the Saudi judicial system, Khawari rearranged her evening in order to attend, and later rallied friends to go to the subsequent discussions. She told me that it had never occurred to her that Saudi women had any legal rights, and she had resented the way that the legal system treated women. “I always thought that the flaw lay in the laws,” she told me. Now, like Ferak and many other lawyers I spoke with, she expressed new confidence in the justice of Saudi law. “Our laws concerning women’s rights are among the best in the world,” she said.

The real problem, she added, was lack of access to information. After the lecture series, Khawari began reading all she could about women’s rights in Islam, and sharing what she learned with her 12 and 13 year old students. Last spring, she gave up her teaching job to study full time toward a master’s degree in social work, with a concentration in human rights. Since then, she said, some of her former students have initiated discussions of women’s legal rights with older women in their families and among their neighbors, and they have asked Khawari to help them assemble leaflets on the subject. Khawari said, “They tell me they want to do something for Saudi society.”

Katherine Zoepf is a fellow at New America. Her first book, “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World,” came out in 2016.

Culture of the National Security State - Deepa Kumar on RAI (Last part)

This last part of the interview with Deepa Kumar is all about how US controls its own public through fear mongering of Soviets, Chinese, Koreans, Talibans, & "terrorist" Muslims.

During the Cold War, Americans were indoctrinated to fear & obey the authorities due to the supposed attacks from Soviets, & their outpost in North America, Cuba. After all, imagine the whole continental America is being afraid of a tiny island nation of Cuba. Ridiculous.

That fear mongering also helped the military-industrial complex to stockpile nuclear weapons by the thousands & thousands. Millions of taxpayers money was poured into making those nuclear weapons & several other kinds of weapons, & instead of being used to create industries & building infrastructure, or helping the poor citizens.

Then, as the "wall came down," the fear mongering shifted towards Muslims & Islam. 9/11 became a pivotal moment to start a drive for global dominance, in the guise of War on Terror, & make & sell billions of weapons around the world. Billions more are being spent on refurbishment of nuclear weapons. Surveillance at home & abroad has become common, so much so, that American citizens are being suspicious of each other. That kind of state where everyone is afraid of everyone else ... I thought that happened in tyrannical states of Syria & Zimbabwe where anything said against the government can get you in prison. But, no, that is the sad state of affairs, or security, in none other than the developed world, & the bastion of democracy & freedom, the United States of America.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFxtnN6olyM

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what is the cultural politics of the national security state?

DEEPA KUMAR, ASSOC. PROF. MEDIA STUDIES AND MIDEAST STUDIES, RUTGERS UNIV.: ... So ... I'm looking at the Cold War period, the post-Second World War period, and the emergence and the birth of the national security state after the National Security Act of 1947, which creates the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then the NSA in '52, and so on. And there is a wholesale militarization of American society. Every aspect of American life, social, intellectual, political, and so on, it gets militarized in this way.

And the question is: how does that become acceptable? And culture is very important in terms of understanding how that happens. And so you have these security rituals, right, the Civil [Defense] department drills, the kind of "duck and cover". ...
...

KUMAR: But the whole point of a security ritual is to cultivate fear and obedience. So you give your consent to Cold War policies, to hot wars, to the complete militarization of society. And so I want to look at those sorts of drills, the various shows, the propaganda work overseas as well as domestically, but build it up to the present, because after 9/11 you see a strengthening of the national security state. And if we had "duck and cover" back then, we have see something, say something, which is the idea that you've got to be suspicious of anyone and anything, and you see and you text. That's the new ritual. And it again cultivates a sort of obedience to the national security state and all the draconian things that are being done--surveillance, drone strikes, all the rest of it--which otherwise would be unacceptable if it weren't for these various cultural practices that make it so.
...

JAY: The origins of the national security state, I mean, it begins in World War II, except they don't demobilize. They go from World War II right into a kind of World War III, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. But it's somewhat a little different than what's happening now, in the sense that it seems to me that the leaders of the time and--Truman and such, they really did see the Soviet Union as an existential threat, partly because it isn't too long before the Soviet Union has nuclear weapons.

Now all of a sudden, America thought it was going to be the thing after World War II. There would be no one else on the planet to rival. And all of a sudden you have a rival. But not only you have a rival; you have what at least is perceived as a socialist rival. You have the beginnings of an enormous population not within the capitalist world. Not too many years later you have China. Now you have, what, almost half the population of the world not within the capitalist world. And this--I don't think--I mean, we've talked to people like Ray McGovern, who was briefing the White House during this period, and he was doing [it] to Reagan and others, and then before Reagan, and they were telling them, listen, the Soviet Union is not going to attack the United States, it's not that kind of a threat.

KUMAR: And mutually assured destruction, right?

JAY: Well, partly that, and partly there'd just be no reason for it. Well, how could the Soviet Union gain anything by attacking the United States?

But the underlying reason for this state is they're terrified of the spread of socialism around the world.

KUMAR: Absolutely. And therefore the Cold War is not only a sort of war that involves the setting up of bases and spheres of influence and all the rest of it, so as to prevent larger parts of the world from the domino theory, right, which is that the Soviet Union was going to collect larger and larger portions of the world and so on. So it was about that. But it's also about ideology. It's about presenting American capitalism and the free enterprise as being the same as free speech, as being the same as individual liberty and human rights and all the rest of it. Right? So it was in that sense both a war in terms of a militaristic war, an international policy, as well as a bolstering of a certain notion of what kind of society--a capitalist society--would actually realize the dreams and aspirations of individuals.

JAY: And so you create this massive machine, which is really about global dominance. And certainly for many years, until ... Soviet Union starts to implode and China starts to transition to capitalism. That kind of threat clearly isn't there anymore.

KUMAR: But then the terrorist threat comes along. And, actually, the terrorist threat, interestingly enough, the word terrorism never used to be used in the U.S. up until the late 1970s. One study of presidential speeches all the way up to the middle of the 1970s finds that the term was rarely used. It's not to say that things that are today called terrorist, such as hijackings of airplanes or kidnappings or what have you didn't happen, but the people who carried out these acts were called air pirates, sky pirates, bandits, rebels, and so on.

But there's a process through the 1970s--and Israel plays a part in this--in terms of defining who the terrorist is. And in the 1980s, in fact, you see this novel theory come into being, which is that terrorists are in league with the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union sponsors an international network of terrorists, and therefore the West should not only fight against the Soviet Union, but it should also be ready to take on the terrorist threat. And, of course, after the collapse of the Soviet Union--.

JAY: The baton gets picked up by Iran, supposedly.

KUMAR: Right. Exactly.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's not immediately the terrorist threat. You have this idea of rogue states, failed states, and a whole bunch of enemies, and so forth. But 9/11 becomes the pivotal moment around which the war on terror can be launched, which in many ways is analogous to the Cold War. You have this enemy. Of course, it's not the same kind of enemy. Terrorists don't have nuclear weapons and all the rest of it. But nevertheless, it's the kind of ideology that's needed to justify war, intervention, and global domination.

JAY: And 13 years or so after--of war on terror, we get something more robust than al-Qaeda ever was, apparently, the Islamic State. What do you make of the media depiction of Islamic State, how this is being dealt with?

KUMAR: I mean, if you look at the very fact that there is a group like Islamic State and that it poses a threat to the United States, you can say one thing, that the world war on terror has failed, right, because if it was working, these groups would be dissolving and so on. And so they're not. But we have been so primed over the course of the 1980s, the 1990s, and so forth with Hollywood films which consistently show terrorists as brown people, as Middle Eastern people--. And there's a whole slew of films from Cannon--this is a company that two Israelis create in which they consistently--they put out dozens of films in which Palestinians fighting for national liberation are seen as the bad guys and so on. And so that's the steady diet on which a whole generation of Americans have grown up, automatically seeing brown people and Middle Easterners and so on as being terrorists. And so by the time we come to 9/11, we're so primed to think of these people as just being these horrible individuals that we need to go off and make war on them.

And it's not just culture. It's even in the news media sphere, right? Remember after the Oklahoma City bombing, when Timothy McVeigh, a homegrown terrorist we later discovered is responsible for it--. The immediate response, however? Middle Eastern. Right? And this was back in the 1990s, when the Oklahoma City bombing takes place. Before it was discovered who the perpetrators are, all of the talking heads, these so-called terrorism experts, are saying this is Middle Eastern, it has Middle Eastern marks all over it, and so forth. So that's sort of been the evolution, which then gets ratcheted up post-9/11.

JAY: One of the things Homeland's been critiqued about and shows like Homeland, and 24, for that matter, is that it justifies mass surveillance of mosques and Muslims in America. But isn't that kind of understandable? I don't mean the shows. But, I mean--and, frankly, that is where--if there's a terrorist threat right now, there's some from right-wing organizations. And in theory we hear about the arrests. And there is surveillance of them as well. And as far as I know, the FBI has people looking into some of the far-right militias and such. ... Now, I know it's a tiny sliver of mosques, it's a very small, marginal number of mosques, and what we're given the context for is mass surveillance of everybody in every mosque, but there's not like there's no basis for it.

KUMAR: Well, the way this can be done in a way that is fair and that is constitutionally valid is if there is sufficient grounds to suspect somebody, then institute some form of surveillance, right? And, actually, it's in response to the sort of complete, indiscriminate surveillance that we saw in the 1960s against all kinds of people, from Martin Luther King to Jane Fonda and so on, that some restrictions were actually placed around who you can surveil and so forth, and there had to be some basis for suspicion. That has been completely done away with in the post-9/11 context. And now, if you're Muslim, you're automatically suspicious. And if you see the theories of radicalization that the FBI, the NYPD, and so on operate around, they have, like, a four-stage or five-stage process where just being a Muslim puts you on the first stage; and then you happen to be religious, you start growing--you know, if you're a man and you start to grow facial hair and wear religious clothing and so on, you're automatically on a fast track towards jihadism. And that is ridiculous. You know, that's such a violation of people's religious freedom rights.

And the end result of that is that you've seen a massive infiltration. For instance, in New York, the NYPD Demographics Unit has people all over, not just in New York City, but in the entire Tri-state area, infiltrating college groups, infiltrating mosques, bookstores, and so on, and keeping detailed records of what people do, how they live their lives, which is such a violation of your privacy, not to mention that it creates such a chilling effect on free speech and all the rest of it. I have students who say, I'm so scared in terms of who to trust who not to trust, because I know that there are agents in our midst. That's not the way in which a free society should treat its citizens.

JAY: Well, ... I understand the logic of doing this, I understand systemic surveillance, I understand infiltrating mosques and all the rest, because if you're going to be a marauder abroad, you're going to have to have a police state at home.

KUMAR: Yes.

JAY: So if you won't question your role in the world, if you just leave that off the table, then, yeah, you're left with these kinds of policy options, because people legitimately want to come and get you. But you've got to kind of add that to it, because--.

KUMAR: No doubt, because actually the current surveillance practices that we have today come out of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. And Alfred McCoy has a book called Policing America's Empire, in which he talks about this constabulary unit that's formed in--American unit that is formed in Manila which uses things like, recruits a bunch of informants, which uses things like spread disinformation about the leaders in the Philippines who are fighting back against American occupation, and so on. And those things come back home and inform the kind of surveillance practices that we have right here. So there's always absolutely--empire is not just something that happens elsewhere; it happens right here.

And I think the key thing that the American state is afraid of is that if people who live in this country, who have relatives who live in Egypt or in Iran or what have you, they will tell a very different story of what the U.S. has done in those countries and therefore have the potential to disrupt the propaganda narrative and feed into an antiwar movement. And they don't want that, and therefore keep them scared, monitor them, police them as a way to stop this kind of information from getting out.